Joining a singleplayer world while only having Polymer installed restricts the initial client render distance to about 2 or 3.
This can be resolved by opening video settings once, without changing any settings.

The total number of chunks loaded seems to still be correct as per my render distance:

Here's the game log, although I don't think it contains any useful information: https://files.lostluma.net/VUw2SR.txt